Stoner

Horace Bostwick was also tall, but he was curiously and unsubstantially heavy, almost corpulent; a fringe of gray hair curled about an otherwise bald skull, and folds of skin hung loosely around his jaws. When he spoke to Stoner he looked directly above his head as if he saw something behind him, and when Stoner answered he drummed his thick fingers upon the center piping of his vest.

Edith greeted Stoner as if he were a casual visitor and then drifted away unconcernedly, busying herself with inconsequential tasks. His eyes followed her, but he could not make her look at him.

It was the largest and most elegant house that Stoner had ever been in. The rooms were very high and dark, and they were crowded with vases of all sizes and shapes, dully gleaming silverwork upon marble-topped tables and commodes and chests, and richly tapestried furniture with most delicate lines. They drifted through several rooms to a large parlor, where, Mrs. Bostwick murmured, she and her husband were in the habit of sitting and chatting informally with friends. Stoner sat in a chair so fragile that he was afraid to move upon it; he felt it shift beneath his weight.

Edith had disappeared; Stoner looked around for her almost frantically. But she did not come back down to the parlor for nearly two hours, until after Stoner and her parents had had their "talk."

The "talk" was indirect and allusive and slow, interrupted by long silences. Horace Bostwick talked about himself in brief speeches directed several inches over Stoner's head. Stoner learned that Bostwick was a Bostonian whose father, late in his life, had ruined his banking career and his son's future in New England by a series of unwise investments that had closed his bank. ("Betrayed," Bostwick announced to the ceiling, "by false friends") Thus the son had come to Missouri shortly after the Civil War, intending to move west; but he had never got farther than Kansas City, where he went occasionally on business trips. Remembering his father's failure, or betrayal, he stayed with his first job in a small St. Louis bank; and in his late thirties, secure in a minor vice-presidency, he married a local girl of good family. From the marriage had come only one child; he had wanted a son and had got a girl, and that was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal. Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance. Every ten or fifteen minutes he removed a large gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at it, and nodded to himself.

Mrs. Bostwick spoke less frequently and less directly of herself, but Stoner quickly had an understanding of her. She was a Southern lady of a certain type. Of an old and discreetly impoverished family, she had grown up with the presumption that the circumstances of need under which the family existed were inappropriate to its quality. She had been taught to look forward to some betterment of that condition, but the betterment had never been very precisely specified. She had gone into her marriage to Horace Bostwick with that dissatisfaction so habitual within her that it was a part of her person; and as the years went on, the dissatisfaction and bitterness increased, so general and pervasive that no specific remedy might assuage them. Her voice was thin and high, and it held a note of hopelessness that gave a special value to every word she said.

It was late in the afternoon before either of them mentioned the matter that had brought them together.

They told him how dear Edith was to them, how concerned they were for her future happiness, of the advantages she had had. Stoner sat in an agony of embarrassment and tried to make responses he hoped were appropriate.

"An extraordinary girl," Mrs. Bostwick said. "So sensitive." The lines in her face deepened, and she said with old bitterness, "No man--no one can fully understand the delicacy of-- of--"

"Yes," Horace Bostwick said shortly. And he began to inquire into what he called Stoner's "prospects." Stoner answered as best he could; he had never thought of his "prospects" before, and he was surprised at how meager they sounded.

Bostwick said, "And you have no--means--beyond your profession?"

"No, sir," Stoner said.

Mr. Bostwick shook his head unhappily. "Edith has had--advantages--you know. A fine home, servants, the best schools. I'm wondering--I find myself afraid, with the reduced standard which would be inevitable with your--ah, condition --that . . ." His voice trailed away.

Stoner felt a sickness rise within him, and an anger. He waited a few moments before he replied, and he made his voice as flat and expressionless as he could.